Sage News and Discussion

I'm looking at the new Sage promotions. Is it me or do most of them seem filled with hidden gotchas. For example - 0% financing on ERP, CRM, HRMS. Hey wonderful - except maintenance and implementation (easily 1/2 or more of the project are at standard lease rates). Odd. Plus the promotions for Sage Intelligence flood me with memories of how I sold three or four of those EES ""upgrade"" deals at super low rates and maintenance - only to have EES discontinued and the customer go through a bump up in maintenance (which was the primary reason most of them ""bought"" the Sage EES promo). Can you blame me for looking at these promotions and being skeptical? Here's the latest mailings compiled in Evernote. Not all of them are Sage but they're all geared toward Sage partners. https://www.evernote.com/pub/mas90guru/sagepartnermailing

For a customer who is only looking for a short term fix of less than two years - I cannot spot the ""gotcha"" in this two year 30% off promo. My guess is that they must commit to a full two years somehow - but at 30% off (and since the maintenance is bundled in the monthly price I dont' think they only apply the 30% to product) this is not a bad deal for off-plan customers.

The maintenance on EES is killer and so are additional users. They went from around $2k on EES for a Sage 100 and CRM user to now paying around $2k for user based pricing and then another $1.4k for the CRM concurrent user. That is a huge jump and rip off if you ask me.

None of my customers bought any additional CRM users. So far, other than most of the EES and grandfather pricing being wrong, we haven't seen huge jumps. I do however question the value a customer is getting for a multi-thousand dollar per year software maintenance renewal.

We had one EES customer renewal that jumped almost 100% due to the number of CRM users they are now being charged maintenance on. Just be aware that Sage will deal on these and the words ""bait and switch"" were brought up by them when we were negotiating the renewal. They know it's a giant cluster and have some seriously pissed off customers.

They can probably have any unneeded CRM licenses removed from their accounts.

They use them. This is somebody that genuinely needed CRM, moved to EES when it was promoted and now is getting taken to the cleaners. I don't think this was the intention of the new pricing structure, or maybe I'm just being hopeful. I think it's an overall lack of focus at Sage and they just don't pay attention to the details. I'll just blame it on Atlas like everything else lately.

Have a client bitching about a big bump in maintenance. Sage's answer is their old maintenance was too low but their system didn't catch it until they switched. I think the average customer is probably pay 2x or more of what they used to pay for maintenance 5 years ago. The rates have bumped some percentage but the hidden fees are the removal of 'grandfathering', whacking people when they moved to MAS200 by getting rid of grandfathering, forced silver plan maintenance etc. In the meantime, the pace of improvements has slowed to a trickle beyond Macabe add-in's and 3rd party plug-ins that generate sage recurring revenue. I still say they are killing the goose one paper cut at a time.

Or one 20 user system off plan at a time....